If purple is the new red…

 No boots on the ground yet, but it’s canvas shoes on warship decks and flying helmets over enemy towns…

So last week it was World War Three already!  But Mr Zelenskyy would say that, wouldn’t he? Even though what his country has been going through for the past four years is not the trauma it experienced in 1941-5 - raped and left for dead by the first Axis of Evil - then reoccupied by the Soviets. Actually, the Nazi invaders at first thought the people of Ukraine were sub-human Slavs (fit only to be wiped out or enslaved), but by 1943 the war was going so badly they began to recruit them into their depleted armies. There was even a Ukrainian branch of the SS. So, when the Russians pushed them back out, again the Ukrainians were seen as enemies to be rounded up and shot, or at least re-educated and enslaved. Hence the current Russian anti-fascist rhetoric. Of course, to Russian eyes, it doesn’t help the Ukrainian cause that large areas of their territory were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But is what’s been going on since 2014 the start - god forbid - of World War Three?

Well, as we saw in World Wars One and Two, none of them gods ever stepped in and stopped the killing. The tragedy was left to act itself out to the bitter end, like the death wish of the totenkopfs came true. Perhaps Germany should have had enough after the horrors of 1914-18? But no, they, their leaders and allies had to have another go in 1939. And isn’t that just what’s being re-enacted now?

Russia is generally agreed to have lost the Cold War in 1989. Like Hitler in the trenches, Putin cut his teeth as a Cold War KGB operative. He and the others who’d had things good during the communist era could see no good reason for the Soviet collapse, just as Hitler and the Freikorps who roamed Germany after 1918 were just looking for the chance to turn the clock back. Isn’t this what’s happening now? And like the Cold War, which dragged on for decades in proxy wars, economic and ideological conflicts, is likely to last decades before the Russian people are completely exhausted and the regime finally collapses?

So now it’s Iran they turn to again, the black hole of war reopened on this front, too. Starmer announces, British planes are in the air. France convenes the Security Council. Meanwhile a so-called Board of Peace presides over the collapse of rule-based International politics. Leaders are openly targeted, schools obliterated simply because they happen to be located next door to military facilities. The people of Iran are expected to take to the streets and with their bare hands overthrow a ruthless Revolutionary Guard that has in the past month or so butchered thousands of protestors. And already (this is only Day Two), as in Venezuela, there are signs the Americans are ready to deal with whoever takes over the government, even if they are basically the same mob that were in charge before. How much more of this bored of peace can the world take before the tipping point into general chaos is reached?

I’m afraid massive rearmament is inevitable. So are reds under the bed, though they’re more likely to be the Farages and Le Penns of this era than the Corbyns and Sanderses  of yesteryear. I guess purple is the new red. But the new blue - who’s that, eh? And stirring in a little yellow, what do we get? Isn’t the US, after its carrier fleets withdraw, destined for an era of inglorious, tariff based, protectionist isolation? And a preoccupation with China and South America that leaves Europe and Africa to fend for themselves. Well, it’s ha-bloody-ha to that. Shares in BAE, anyone?

Not Another Bloody Cease Fire, uh?